Guardrails
The limits placed on what an AI may say or do — refusing certain requests, staying on topic, never inventing a price. Essential on anything customer-facing.
Related terms
robots.txt
A plain text file at the root of a site listing which bots may read what. It is a request rather than a lock — well-behaved crawlers obey it, and all the major AI crawlers do.
AI Search
Searching by asking a question in ordinary language and getting a written reply, rather than typing keywords and choosing from links. It changes what a website has to do: be readable and quotable by a machine, not just findable.
Speakable Schema
Markup identifying the parts of a page suitable to be read aloud by a voice assistant. Narrow in application, but it removes the guesswork about which sentence answers the question.
Long-Tail Query
A longer, more specific search — “boutique hotel Siem Reap near Pub Street with a pool” rather than “hotel”. Individually rare, collectively most of all searches, and far easier to answer well.
Markdown
A plain-text way of writing formatted documents using symbols like # for a heading. AI systems read it easily because the structure is unambiguous, which is why some sites now offer it alongside HTML.
AI Share of Voice
How often your business is named when assistants are asked about your category, compared with competitors. There is no official figure, so it is measured by asking the same questions repeatedly and counting.